10. Whenever, then, there is a combination of the preceding symptoms, with a pulse about 90, it may be inferred with great certainty, that disease is going on in the intestines. But, as the pain of the abdomen ceases at a certain period, while the purging continues, so, at a still more advanced stage of the disease, the purging also disappears, and the stools return to a more natural condition. Cessation of pain, and an apparent return to healthy secretion and excretion, may seem to indicate a highly favourable change in the disease, and, _if accompanied with corresponding amendment in the other symptoms_, they may, indeed, be hailed as signs of returning health; but if they occur _without_ a favourable change in the general symptoms, they do not indicate a return to health, but merely the transition of one diseased process into another. What that succession of diseased processes is will be stated hereafter: at present it is sufficient to observe that, without corresponding improvement in other organs, the cessation of purging is a sign not of returning health, but of advancing disease. And so common is the cessation of purging, _without amendment_, at an advanced stage of abdominal affection, that in a large proportion of the patients who are received into the Fever Hospital, it has ceased before their admission. On the examination of a patient, for the first time, who has been ill from a fortnight to three weeks, it will be stated that the stools are regular, yet if strict inquiry be made, it will often be found that at an earlier stage of the disease from four to five stools, sometimes from eight to ten, were passed in the twenty-four hours without any purgative medicine having been taken. With regard to the state of the evacuations in this affection, then, the succession of events is first constipation, then purging, and next the cessation of purging and the return of the stools to a more natural character.